Interview with Lola Creel

The following interview by Shannon Hemmings is part of a series featuring the amazing female filmmakers that are a part of the 2013 Raindance Festival.

What inspired you to get into Film-making?

Film making has been in my own natural character since I was very young. My first camera was a Bauer super 8 that a friend of mine gave as a present when I was 21. I travelled with that camera and a tripod in India from 1976 to 1983. I always tried to shoot those moments where persons are completely themselves, and don’t have artificial behavior. Now I think a little differently about how to do a film, because I also recreate scenes, but always try to find moments that have complete honesty or deep interpretation of any subject with total revelation of the inner secret state, or emotions of the person.

So to your question, what inspires me is always the eternal source of energy that is in any human being and its very original expression.

How does it feel having your film at Raindance?

It feels great to be in Raindance Festival, and an honor to be selected in a festival that is the leader in screening independent films in Europe. I have always worked silently and very independently from my childhood on… It takes hours of being alone with myself to do a film like “Journey of Hanuman”. I have thought so much about the relation of life and death, the meaning of the instant of love, where you get magicaly transported into another state that becomes so transcendental. I have deeply transformed myself with each film, because it comes not just from images that are outside, but inside myself.

In “Journey of Hanuman” I did the Direction, the Editing, the Scripting, the Special Effects and the Production, and also big part of the Color Correction. So my way is totally like the Raindance festival, rooted in the independence and freedom.

What’s it like being a female Director in your native country?

To be a female has not been so difficult as to try to be a filmmaker in a country as Mexico with all its problems of corruption, social economical big contrasts, and lack of opportunities, and disbelieve. We have always had great artists in Mexico , and also great filmmakers and they are the ones that motivated me and inspired my way when I was very young to become a video artist and filmmaker. For example Luis Buñuel, who did so many films in Mexico from 1946 – 1965 with a great photographer Gabriel Figueroa. Buñuel was so motivated by all the surrealist society we live in Mexico, he did care about all this persons that are left aside and forgotten, and live a social unfair disqualification, and did the ¨Olvidados or “the young and the damned”…in his extraordinary surrealist language.

I belong in a way to that surrealist art movement, and consider Mexico in that sense the more creative and imaginative land, where the sacred and magical even though always hidden, remain so strong that it nourishes the positive side of my country.

What do you hope to accomplish in the future?

I hope to do some more films that come always from my heart, but over all I always ask to be inspired or guided by that source that creates our universe.